Variations on a Theme

Adam Thirlwell interviewed by Susan Tomaselli

In the British literary establishment (and let’s face it,

named Granta Best Young Novelist not once but twice is
‘establishment’), Adam Thirlwell is something of a Trojan
horse: ‘Good novelists (or, maybe more honestly, the
novelists I like) are often not just avant-garde in terms of
technique; they are morally avant-garde as well.’ His novels—
Politics (2003), The Escape (2009)—use Milan Kundera
and Philip Roth as templates, and feature digressions on
Osip Mandelstam, the Bauhaus and Saul Bellow, to name
but a few. With their narratorial interventions and other
unconventional stylistic quirks, they flaunt the usual rules
of sexual comedies. But Thirlwell is a master of turning
ideas upside down (and inside out), no more so than in his
novella Kapow! (2012), a response to the Arab Spring that
uses typography, fold-out pages and wordplay to mimic
the noisy confusion of events as they emerged on Twitter
and YouTube. It is the missing link between Tristram Shandy
and the Mayakovsky’s For the Voice as designed by Lissitzky.
Thirlwell has always been interested in the international
and the experimental, and his Miss Herbert (2007), named
for an English governess who may or may not have been
Flaubert’s mistress, and may or may not have helped him
translate Madame Bovary, is his brilliant understanding of the
possibilities of translation through a miniature history of
the novel (or, an ‘anti-novel, with novelists as characters,’ as
he puts it). It’s a theme he continues to explore in Multiples
(2013), a ‘project for multiplying novels in any language,’
inspired, partly, by Augusto Monterroso.

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ST Could you maybe frame Multiples? How did the project come
about? What is an experiment in multiplying translation?
And how does it relate to artists’ multiples?

AT I suppose Multiples had a sort of giant theoretical cause in

the background; and then many, much smaller practical
ones. The giant theoretical cause was wanting to prove
something or investigate something further that I’d written
about before—a wish to prove that in some way it would
be possible to reconcile style and translation (like trying to
mate two different species to create some mythical beast).
I’d thought maybe you could, if you just thought differently
about them both, if you relaxed or enlarged their definitions.
I began to think of a work as a set of instructions for future
construction—as you mention below. But the more I thought
about it the more I wondered that, if that were true, then
the real conclusions necessary would be even wilder than I’d
first imagined. I started thinking of experiments with third
languages, and imitations rather than literal translations. But
while theory is one thing, in the end the fun is the practical
results. That was how I had a very vague utopian idea of
a series of stories that would be translated by a series of
novelists—to see what would happen to the story by its end:
which would be partly an experiment with what we meant
by an original, and translation, and also what we meant by
style. There, however, I would have happily paused—just
contemplating this imaginary experiment. And therefore the
true cause of this project actually existing was the mistake
of mentioning that very vague ideal to the novelist Vendela
Vida, so that suddenly, weeks later, I was on Skype and

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agreeing to set up a giant version of this ideal for McSweeney’s

Quarterly in San Francisco—which in the end comprised
twelve stories, each of which got translated and retranslated
in series of up to five versions.
As for the title, that emerged as I tried to think about
what it was we were creating, as the project began to grow.
And I suppose Multiples was a deliberately double title. In that
on the one hand it was a kind of joke, since these are almost
the opposite of artists’ multiples—these writers’ multiples
are each entirely different objects, they’re reproductions
that are all originals—and yet at the same time I wanted to
imply that maybe there was a way of seeing these multiples
as more similar to artists’ multiples than might at first be
obvious: that in some way each version, however zany it
might seem in relation to the original, was still a flawless
reproduction, too.

Beckett changed languages because he wanted to be ‘ill ST

equipped,’ because French allowed him to write ‘without
style.’ You’ve deliberately chosen novelists rather than
translators because of their style, haven’t you? How did you
assemble the writers for the project?

(Don’t you think though that Beckett’s reasons he gave for AT

writing in French aren’t quite right? It seems to me that
there’s something about the usefulness of French for minute
distinctions, that exhaustive clockwork of symmetric syntax,
that’s somehow linked to his discovery of his own exhaustive
style… Anyway, sorry, that’s a digression.)

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Yes, I chose novelists and deliberately excluded

translators—not because I have such a hatred of translators,
but because I wanted to see what would happen to the style
of the original when faced with people whose usual mode is
to subject everything they see to their own style… I wanted
to exaggerate the problems facing the story’s survival.
And I assembled the writers in a zigzagging way—
beginning with as many friends as possible, and then
proceeding through friends of friends and then dream
luminaries like J.M. Coetzee and Javier Marías. The deep
project was: I wanted novelists, overall, who each possessed
a particular style; and who in their different ways were
engaged in the creation of a unique linguistic pattern. But,
as in every composition, the initial freedom was constrained
by the first moves in the sequence—so that I had to keep
filing in the pattern formed by each novelist in the series: if
a French novelist could translate from English, that meant I
then needed to find an English novelist who could translate
from French, and so on… And if there are more English-
speaking novelists who can translate from Spanish than they
can from, say, Chinese, that’s why there are fewer Chinese
novelists than Spanish-speaking ones.

ST Style is something you’ve discussed before. In Miss Herbert

you said that style is not national and the style of a novel
was a ‘set of instructions…never able to create an entirely
unique, irreplaceable object.’ This is how translation is
possible, isn’t it? It’s translation as a variation, rather than
a precise reproduction. Thomas Bernhard wasn’t a fan of
translation: ‘Translations hit the market as distortions /

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It’s the dilettantism / And the dirt of the translator / That

makes a translation so repulsive.’ But isn’t that the point of
Multiples? Distortions? After all, Paul Klee thought genius
was an ‘error’ in the system; Bolaño that the sign of a work
of art was to let it be translated, let the translator be far from
brilliant.

I love that Bernhard quotation. And of course, he’s right, in a AT

way. That disgust is universal. The existence of any translation
is a kind of disgrace. But also I think that, philosophically,
he’s deeply wrong. His disgust is just the obverse of a crazy
dream, the dream of the perfect translation—which itself
is based on a dream of a perfect style. But there’s no such
thing as the perfect style, which is why there’s no need to
be angry that no translation is perfect, either. A translation
can only be an imitation in certain ways: it can never be
comprehensive. Which is why distortions are, in the end, to
be encouraged. For even the purest, most faithful translation
will represent a systematic distortion. So that yes in the end,
I’m with Bolaño: a work that resisted all translation wouldn’t
in fact be a work of art at all. A translation is a reading, an
interruption. So my ideal with this project was to intensify
that distortion: to create a multiple thing, all grainy and
pollinated and drifting…

You’ve translated before, Nabokov’s ‘Mademoiselle O’ ST

for your book Miss Herbert. As Nabokov advocated literal
translation, did the practice of translating him influence
your translation? Did it cast a shadow over Multiples?

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AT Definitely when I was translating ‘Mademoiselle O’ I tried

to make a translation that Nabokov would have approved
of…I made it as sternly as I could. But I think Multiples
was my anti-Nabokov project. And it was partly prompted
by discovering something I hadn’t known before—when
writing for the NYRB on Nabokov’s translations. It turned
out that Nabokov himself had made a very different sketch
for a translation of Eugene Onegin—three stanzas—which
instead of the stern literalism he advocated later were
written in a lovely imitation of Pushkin’s metre. I wish VN
had continued with that translation! It would have been the
perfect recreation of Pushkin in English. And it was the
direct opposite of his later theories. And so it was thinking
about the reasons for VN’s shift in ideas about translation
that made me wonder if in fact there could be another kind
of ideal translation, too. Multiples is my revolution. Or self-
coup.

ST Didn’t you also translate Gogol, Chekov, Kundera, Hra-

bal, Schulz? And turn Madame Bovary down? Is translation
something you may return to? Why don’t novelists translate
more?

AT It’s true I made drafts of translations for Miss Herbert—

as well as ‘Mademoiselle O’—which included stories by
all those novelists. And I decided in the end to put them
aside. The reason for not translating Madame Bovary was a
pure problem of time. It would take so many years to do
it properly! Which is I think the main reason why novelists
don’t translate more. But also there’s a cultural reason for

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that lack which I wanted to question with Multiples: I feel

that prose gets treated with too much orthodoxy, as opposed
to poetry. There’s a tyranny of the idea of the professional.
Whereas me, I want a prose version of Lowell’s Imitations!
Whether I’ll go back to translation, I don’t know. For the
moment I’m wondering if I’ve done what I want to do with
translations… It was some necessary route of dismantling.

You’ve said that you’ve wanted to make translation more ST

joyful. What has been the response to Multiples from
translators? From its contributors?

Well, luckily, people seem to have liked it… I think its AT

contributors all enjoyed the process—especially since it was
often the first time they’d ever done a translation at all. And
they were often surprised by the nature of the difficulties—
which are always so minute and recalcitrant. So in fact
maybe the contributors themselves had a harder time in the
actual making of the texts… I think they were then kind
of amazed, as was I, when they discovered how vast the
finished project had become.
I did worry that translators in particular would be
enraged by the exclusion of translators. But instead brilliant
translators like Daniel Hahn and Maureen Freely and Frank
Wynne all seem to like it. Which I’d hope they would, I
suppose—as after all it’s a project whose intent is purely
benign, in one sense—to reveal translation as a possible
form of art, and as a mode that demands more respect
than it often receives. Although also it’s true, it occurs to
me, that this book does have its dark side. Perhaps an angry

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refusal of this project would also be rational. Because there’s

a way that this comic treat is also a noir contraption: like
I’ve always liked those sinister objects by Man Ray, that are
almost toys, but aren’t. Its implications for what a translation
could be, or what an original could be, or what is happening
at all when a translation is being read, well I suppose it’s true
that they’re quite malign…

ST Multiples is a visual treat, as was Miss Herbert, and Kapow! was

described as a Cy Twombly painting with their cascading
texts. Would you collaborate directly with an artist, is
that something that interests you? Like the modernist
little magazine collaborations, or more recently, László
Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, or Alexander Kluge and
Gerhard Richter?

AT I love Animalinside, and what Kluge and Richter have done

too. And I’ve always adored those multimedia modernist
magazines: or also the books in Moscow in the 1920s, like
El Lissitzky’s Mayakovsky. So yes, the idea does interest
me. And I do like producing books that have some kind of
visual kink to them. (Even if, in the case of Miss Herbert and
Multiples, that was really the contribution of the publishers
and their designers, rather than a deliberate part of the
work’s thinking.) And I do also sometimes feel sad that a
certain freedom of thinking about art among artists isn’t
quite replicated in the thinking about literature. I enjoy trying
to imagine ways in which literature could be made more
liberated—one of which, definitely, would be collaborations
with artists themselves. I think I also find the general idea

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of collaboration intriguing—and partly as a result of this

giant project. It’s interesting how far literature is conceived
as a singular project: whereas it seems to me that there are
more mini collectives and collaborations that are possible.
Not just artists and writers, but also writers together: like
Bioy Casares and Borges inventing their authors and works.

What can you tell us about Lurid & Cute? Is that finished? ST
What’s next for you?

It’s a novel. Oh, what can I tell you? I’m trying to invent the AT
most innocent narrator in world literature, who the reader
gradually realises is also the most frightening… That’s the
ideal. But it isn’t finished. Not at all. Finishing it is what’s
next for me. I hope.

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